Happy 30th Anniversary, Turbo Pascal!

September 5, 2013

By Developer.com Staff

As part of its own 30th anniversary celebration, eWeek takes a look back at a truly revolutionary software development tool, which, coincidentally, also turns 30 this year. Turbo Pascal, created by Borland International, was one of the first to integrate a code editor, debugger and compiler into a single package.

"The '80s were a fun time—the beginning of the democratization of computing that we've all lived for the past 30 years," recalled Turbo Pascal creator Anders Hejlsberg.

"Borland made developer tools accessible by selling a complete editor/compiler for an incredibly low price," noted Mike Sax, founder of accounting software company Asigo. "I believe it was 10 times cheaper than leading competitors. At least as important, and often overlooked, Borland made tools more accessible by requiring far less memory and disk space than other vendors, combining the editor and the compiler in a single, incredibly efficient executable. These were the days when PCs without hard drives were still common."